Faculty Profiles
Distinguished Service Professor Mark Ardis received a BA in Mathematics from Cornell University and MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. He spent the first part of his computing career as a government contractor for NASA, the Department of Labor, the Department of Health Education and Welfare, and the Department of Defense. After completing his PhD he taught software engineering courses at the University of Illinois, Wang Institute of Graduate Studies, and Carnegie Mellon University. As a member of the Educational Program at the Software Engineering Institute he helped start several new Master of Software Engineering programs.
In 1991 Dr. Ardis joined the Department of Software Production Research at Bell Laboratories, where he conducted research in formal methods and software product line engineering for systems with high reliability requirements. He returned to academia in 2000, helping to start a new Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering program at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. In 2006 Dr. Ardis joined Rochester Institute of Technology, where he was Graduate Program Coordinator for Software Engineering. In 2009 he joined Stevens Institute of Technology as Distinguished Service Professor. His research interests are in software engineering education, formal methods for specification and design, software product line engineering and software quality assurance.
Robbie Cohen joins the faculty of Stevens’ Software Engineering program after having spent 30 years in the telecommunications industry. There she held positions ranging from technical contributor to executive. While most of her telecom career was spent with Bell Laboratories, she also did multi-year stints at the Paradyne Corporation and Telcordia Technologies, as well as serving as an independent consultant. Prior to joining Bell Laboratories in 1979, Robbie was an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Dr. Art Pyster is a Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology and the Deputy Executive Director of the Systems Engineering Research Center, which is a Department of Defense’s University Affiliated Research Center. During much of 2007 and 2008, he also served as the Director of the Software Engineering Program at Stevens Institute as well as the Stevens Director for the Applied Systems Thinking Institute.
Before joining Stevens in March 2007, Dr. Pyster served as the Senior Vice President and Director of Systems Engineering and Integration for SAIC. Earlier, Dr. Pyster served as the Deputy Chief Information Officer for the Federal Aviation Administration, where he oversaw information technology investment and policy, created and operated the agency’s information security program, created the agency’s enterprise architecture, operated their process improvement program, and achieved a “green” score on the President’s Management Agenda.
Earlier assignments included being the Chief Scientist for Software Engineering for the Federal Aviation Administration, Chief Technical Officer for the Software Productivity Consortium, Director at Digital Sound Corporation, Manager of Systems Engineering at TRW, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
During his career, Dr. Pyster directed the creation of three Capability Maturity Models, oversaw more than $10 billion in investment, directed the creation of several software and systems engineering methods, delivered commercial telecommunications systems with extremely low defects, and managed training programs for thousands of engineers and managers.
His professional and research activities emphasize systems and software engineering, especially the integration of those two disciplines and their application to enterprise operations. Currently, he is leading two international research projects. The first effort is creating a reference curriculum for graduate software engineering education. Notably, that reference curriculum explicitly integrates systems engineering into the education of software engineers. The second effort is creating a body of knowledge for systems engineering as well as a reference curriculum for graduate systems engineering education.
Dr. Pyster has authored many papers and one textbook – Compiler Design and Construction. Previously, he chaired the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Corporate Advisory Board. Currently, he is an INCOSE Fellow, the INCOSE Director for Academic Matters, a member of the INCOSE Board of Directors, and a senior member of the IEEE.
He conceived and evolved the concept of the DoD Acquisition Best Practices Clearinghouse. Currently being developed by Computer Sciences Corporation, the Fraunhofer Center at the University of Maryland, and the Defense Acquisition University, the Clearinghouse is the first repository of context-specific empirical information about software and systems practices. He is co-author of three books: Balancing Agility and Discipline: A Guide for the Perplexed (Addison-Wesley, 2004), co-written with Barry Boehm, CMMIsm Distilled (Addison-Wesley 2000, 2004), and CMMI Survival Guide: Just enough Process Improvement, co-authored with Suzanne Garcia (Addison-Wesley 2007). Both CMMI titles are part of Addison-Wesley’s SEI Series in Software Engineering.